I’m putting together the State of the Word address for the upcoming WordCamp San Francicso, and one thing I like to do every year is highlight some cool WordPress-powered sites, especially ones that show off the power of the platform. I have a few in mind already, but are there any WP sites you’ve seen recently that really blew your mind? Leave links in the comments.

http://www.Spicebaby.com BLEW my mind!!! using isitwp.com i checked and its on wordpress. Cuhrazy UI. I love food but i haven’t quite seen food presented like this. My only issue is they should expand to other foreign cuisines.

http://programacao.baixocentro.org – this website uses a theme/plugin named Maps of View (http://mapasdevista.hacklab.com.br/), which locates posts on a google maps, an openstreet maps or even any image. This website is the schedule of a Culture Festival at São Paulo city. Each event is a post located on Google Map. You can turn the categories on/off to view only the events on an especific category.

This isn’t a particular site (and I’m not trying to plug the designer/Envato either), but this WP theme blows me away – http://themes.themolitor.com/wpnovelist/ – partly because I’ve never seen such unique display and partly because it’s also responsive =)

http://nh7.in We run two wordpress powered sections one on http://nh7.in and one on http://nh7.in/indiecision. We have built an integrated search and single signon across both with a lot of nifty features like a html5 enabled audio player which seamlessly plays audio using html5 push state. Phew.

GameFroot – which, I’m told, uses CPTs for storing game artifacts as you build your very own game on WordPress (it’s another Dan Milward creation);TedX Canberra – cool because of it’s very CMS like use of custom post types & custom taxonomies for Talks & Presenters;GovSpace – because it’s the Australian Federal Government’s very own personal WordPress.com which is reducing the cost of managing government websites like The Energy Efficiency Exchange.

Even if it looks simple, I think if you go deeper you will see that the database is very well structured on http://www.firm-guide.com/company/. That would be my recommendation And Matt, you should also consider how fast is this “Coolest website loading”

Gotta mention the trend for rock megastars starting to use WordPress. We were quite blown away by Arcade (Sony)’s work on http://brucespringsteen.net – we took a lot of inspiration from it, and hopefully added some magic of our own, when we were building the new http://rollingstones.com site.

We’re also pretty proud of the work we did with Oxford University on http://freespeechdebate.com – a discussion site around freedom of expression issues, simultaneously in 13 languages, including some of the tricky ones. And sometimes several on the page at once.

One of my favorites is http://www.rentabilities.com …. boot strapped their business with WordPress and won Mass Challenege. The site continues to be powered by WordPress with over 100,000 items for rent in their database.

The WordPress showcase also needs to get going again. It’s been almost 2 months since an update. I’m sure other people have found great stuff we just don’t know about yet.

http://myscribbit.com uses WordPress with the Figero them from Inkthemes,com as the front-end with custom PHP coding behind the scenes to enable the voicemail transcription service. A special framework was created to isolate the back-end code so that changes to WordPress via the WordPress admin couldn’t break the back-end code.

Hey Matt, shameless self promotion. After five years of blogging daily — my blog is RetroRenovation.com — I now make a good fulltime living from it. No tricks. Just like Google always preaches: The focus is on consistently delivering great original content. In my case: I help my readers (230,000 uniques in July) to find the resources that they need renovate their homes in a style that is harmonious with their original, midcentury style. I’ve worked hard on navigation over the years to help them drill down, WebDev Studios helps me.

I even have now been able to hire a part-time contributor — my goal is to grow some more so I can create another American job! And hey, the New York Times even did a full-page story about my blog.

None of this would have been possible without WordPress — its amazing functionality and versatility — and the fact that it gives people like me who are passionate about “niche” topics the power to become bona-fide publishers. Pick me pick me! Many thanks for all you do!

One of the coolest WP sites we’ve built is http://baja.com. It’s a Multisite network, with each Baja region being it’s own site. Each site features 10 CPTs, which are all aggregated to the main site for the network wide search for hotels, vacation rentals, restaurants, etc.

Anyone I have ever showed this site to couldn’t believe it was built in WordPress. It really demonstrates the power of WordPress as a CMS.

I just built my first real “professional” web site for the organization I work for. It has almost 1000 pages as we are a music festival that produces 46 shows and 238 Community Cultural Events featuring nearly 300 artists in over 55 communities over nine days.

WordPress and the “types and Views” plugins – http://wp-types.com – made it possible to pull all of the festival info out of our custom database via xml and present it in a manner that would allow our audience to wrap their heads around it all.

I absolutely love my own WordPress sites. They make me happy, money, friends and comrades. And they are a fantastic hobby which makes them the coolest WordPress sites in the world. But I wont focus on my own stuff here, because I gather, that it’s mostly me that has such warm feelings towards them

I’m a huge fan of Justin Tadlock and Woothemes. But the WP site that most recently blew my mind isn’t even a site, it’s a portfolio theme from theme forest called Zwin. I haven’t tried it (and I’m not affiliated), but I like the way that it has done a bunch of thing in the front- as well as back-end. And also that it’s responsive which must be a demand for most themes being developed in this day and age.

This is probably a non-traditional use of WordPress, but we used it in conjunction with Google maps for our campus map. Each post is a building, with custom fields for dropping pins, drawing hover states, and drawing polygons. It’s entirely WordPress powered: http://www.uw.edu/maps/

There is an excellent blog called UnerasedHistory (http://unerasedhistory.com) that might be considered and another by the same author called Founders Voices (foundersvoices.com) that concentrates on the US Constitution.

http://scotuscompetition.com/ a website (sponsored by Bloomberg Law and Goldstein and Russell) that allows law students to form and manage teams that compete for a prize by predicting the outcome of Supreme Court cases. Sister site to http://scotusblog,com the most widely read blog covering the Supreme Court.

We decided to move our site over to WP.com after all – we used the idea you gave me of creating an image and then posting it (for our to-date gallons collected widget), and used native tools to get “close enough”. So far things are working out great – http://www.dieselgreenfuels.com. Nothing fancy, just a simple company site based on WordPress.

I’m definitely biased, I developed this site, but I feel like http://captricity.com really showcases some of the power of WordPress. I used a combination of Custom Post types, the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, and the Posts 2 Posts plugin to give the company a highly customizable site.

HI Matt: http://www.saltspringexchange.com is a site my friend and I started to service our small island near Vancouver, Canada. (Craig’s list doesn’t really work outside of the city centres.)

It has become the go-to place for thousands of Salt Spring islanders, to post messages about lost pets, unwanted items ( that quickly find new uses,) plus business listings and homes for rent etc.. It works because Word Press is so easy for non-tech oriented community members to use.

The number of people who have sent us thank you messages for finding lost items, new jobs, mentors, homes, etc has been really heart warming. Check out the lost and found section for example.

A local radio show does a segment each week reading the funniest and weirdest postings… and there are some good ones.

We keep the Exchange free except for a couple of business categories. We made no money for the first two years, but now businesses are contacting us to advertise on the site as it has such high traffic and people love how it helps our community so they want to support it.

We won the best new business from the Chamber of Commerce last year.

I am an advocate for WordPress in my day job — and have gotten many clients to start using WordPress as a basis for their websites.

Background: I designed, coded and maintained this website since 2006. The front page changes every month with each new exhibition. Kussner Web just recently completed a WordPress conversion and redesign that includes a CPT for exhibitions, which spans back since 2005.